A ghost word is a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work even though it had not previously had any meaning or been used intentionally. A ghost word generally originates from a typographical or linguistic error, taken as an unfamiliar word by readers. Once authoritatively published, a ghost word occasionally may be copied widely and enter legitimate usage, or it may eventually be expunged by more fastidious lexicographers. Origin The term was coined by Professor Walter William Skeat in his annual address as president of the Philological Society in 1886: It turned out that "kimes" was a misprint for "knives", but the word gained currency for some time. A more drastic example followed, also cited in Skeat's address: One edition of The Monastery containing the misprint was published by the Edinburgh University Press in 1820. More examples In his address, Skeat exhibited about 100 more specimens that he had collected. Other examples include: The supposed Homeric Greek word () = "woman", which arose thus: In Iliad Book 1 line 6 is the phrase () = "two (i.e. Achilles and Agamemnon) stood apart making strife". However someone unfamiliar with dual number verb inflections read it as () = "two making strife because of a stētē", and they guessed that meant the woman Briseis who was the subject of the strife, influenced by the fact that nouns ending with eta are usually feminine. The placename Sarum, which arose by misunderstanding of the abbreviation Sar~ used in a medieval manuscript to mean some early form such as "Sarisberie" (= Salisbury). As an example of an editing mistake, "dord" was defined as a noun meaning density (mass per unit volume). When the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary was being prepared, an index card that read "D or d" with reference to the word "density" was incorrectly misfiled as a word instead of an abbreviation. The entry existed in more than one printing from 1934 to 1947. A Concise Dictionary of Pronunciation () accidentally included the nonexistent word testentry (evidently a feature of work-in-progress), with spurious British and US pronunciations as though it rhymed with pedantry. The OED explains the ghost word phantomnation as "Appearance of a phantom; illusion. Error for phantom nation". Alexander Pope's (1725) translation of the Odyssey originally said, "The Phantome-nations of the dead". Richard Paul Jodrell's (1820) Philology of the English Language, which omitted hyphens from